Three works from ‘The Marionette’, 2025. Installation Views, Arcadia Missa, London
This is a series I call the ‘The Marionette Studies’, a collection of personal drawings on coloured and newsprint paper. Each is appropriately titled, ‘The Marionette I’, ‘The Marionette II’ and so forth, to codify its interpretive difference of Carlo Callodi’s humanist fable, The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883). The marionette, itself being a performing object defined by its inertia and malleability, continues my interest in the subject of theater.
‘Marionette I’ has the character of Pinocchio collapsed with his wooden rear pointed at the sky, limbs splayed across a terrain of dusty pink paper. His pose assumes a level of exhaustion or sexual debasement, though cartoonish. The cartoonishness lends itself to Pinnochio’s many adaptations, notably the 1940 Disney film, the studio’s second animated feature film in its history. Pinnochio faces what seem to be a series of constant failures or existential threats as a response to his impertinence: he is almost eaten at every turn, his nose grows freakishly longer as he lies. His waywardness - his desires for self-actualisation outside of the home, ‘the puppet breaking free of his strings’ - is treated as disruptive to his journey of reaching adulthood (or normalcy) and thus, must be neutralised.
I consider Pinnochio’s relentless attempts at trespassing these mandates of adulthood, of growing up, potent. At its heart, Collodi’s tale is a coming of age story, written on the cusp of Italy’s afflicted transition into modernity, but I believe also one of gender. I’m interested in Pinocchio as autobiography, specifically as a trans figure but also as a symbol of (failed) masculinities and its fracturings. It goes beyond the journeying of becoming a real boy, as obvious as the correlation may be. It has further provoked me to consider the confines of the marionette as an allegory/metaphor itself - what is the indeterminate body? What constitutes the real?
In ‘Marionette III’, the negative space exists as a mirror between Pinnochio and the self-insert of the artist. The figure of Pinnochio is realised in technicolour while my body’s silhouette remains empty, uncarved. Here, the analogical difference is expressed diagrametically. The mirror serves both purposes - the duplication of one’s image as well as a speculative activity. The legibility of this image is purposeful for me as being reflective of two inorganic or ‘counterfeit’ masculinities staring back at one another, both characterised by their shared want and wanting.
18.1–16.2.2025
Group show with Mark Barker, Adam Patrick Grant, Clémence Lollia Hilaire,
Terence McCormack, Artem Nanushyan, Niklas Taleb, Rhianna Turnbull, James Whittingham
The Courtesy: Arcadia Missa, 243 Luz and Roland Ross
Photos by: Tom Carter